A resource to find out about the west coast adventure race scene and to provide an inside look into an athlete's viewpoint of racing, training and traveling around the world in the pursuit of adventure.

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Winter BEAST race and the winter storm of 2007

The Winter BEAST 2007 turned out to be a real test and for some reason coincided with the first big winter storm in Seattle. DART-nuun had 3 members of the team participating in the lottery program where we get teamed up with new adventure racers or racers that are interested in racing with us. This serves as a great opportunity to give many inside tips and tricks of the trade to racers that don't have the breadth of experience under their belts that we do.

There was an incredible turn out and it was great to see people out ready to test themselves against the elements. Here are the race reports I have seen so far and they are great testemants to how nasty it was out there...winners of the BEAST and great guys Gary and Todd from up north and DART-nuun member Matt

I was teamed up with three of my coworkers and assured them that we would breeze through the course ...little did I know we signed up for suffer fest 2007! Brent, Greg and Dave toed the line with me and were ready to roll when the start gun went offyour .

Course overview:

-35 checkpoints, 25 biking and 10 trekking.

-20~ miles of biking and maybe 5-7 miles of trekking/running/bushwhacking.

The race was on, in route to CP4 we had a racer down with massive cramps in his quads. The cold conditions and lack of fluids took their toll...we started pumping electrolytes and upped the amount of nuun in his water immediately. I gave Dave a brief introduction to my friend the bike tow and we were off. From here we fell into our groove and picked off the CP's one by one. Brent and I alternated with the navigation in route to the transition, he did great.

We were cold...but had seen worse. The key to survival was constant forward motion. If our feet got cold we jumped off our bikes and ran until the blood in our body was pumping. If cramps came we downed more nuun and did our best to fight off any more by eating regularly.

We jockeyed with racing veterans, the Commandoughs who had also picked up a lottery DART member (Aaron), from CP 5 into the transition. This was a battle royal and I was going to pull out all the tricks to keep us in contention. Jill (Commandough superstar) got a bit cold and we called off the dogs just long enough hook her up with some gloves and get the pit fight back on.

Out of transition we were 5 minutes back on the commandoughs and feeling good about being on our feet. After a short bushwhack (a first for Greg and Dave) we said hi to the commandoughs again. Neck and neck until CP7 where I took the team slightly off route and through a fun bushwhack they had pulled ahead. We succeeded in our mission to complete the full course, in what turned out to be a war of attrition...and cold. We were the last team to finish the full course and the gang was excited to be back and closer to their cars and some warmth.